It is important for telecommunications systems to be able to detect and report most if not all of the various defects and failures that might occur on the equipment and/or on the received signals transmitted over networks. Because of the complexity and extent of present Wide Area Network (WAN) systems, many different types of network failures are possible. For example, failures may be caused by cut cables, network interface device faults, dropped data packets due to protocol errors, and so on. Furthermore, not all faults or errors are of equal severity. For example, some faults, such as dropped packets, may be easier to correct, whereas other types of faults, such as hardware failures or cut transmission lines, may be much more serious. Moreover, different network operators may have different requirements with respect to how network failures and errors are handled. Because of the wide range of possible errors, and different degrees of severity of the faults, telecommunications systems should provide operators with the ability to flexibly monitor and manage the various types of network faults that might occur.
Many present telecommunications systems do provide some degree of error reporting and management. However, these present error reporting systems all possess certain significant disadvantages. Most network management systems provide a default setting of the alarm conditions. This default setting is usually specified by the network vendor or system integrator, and although some systems do allow some provisioning of alarms, many systems do not allow the user to provision the alarms differently than the default setting. This effectively limits the alarm monitoring function to parameters specified by the vendor and does not allow flexible alarm definitions by the user.
Another present alarm monitoring system for communications networks provides a single alarm profile for all of the alarms maintained. Although the user may, in some implementations, be allowed to change this alarm profile, all alarm conditions are treated equivalently. This system does not allow different types of fault conditions to be monitored differently. Other alarm monitoring systems may allow the definition of several alarm profiles. However, these systems typically operate on a system basis and may not allow the definition of alarm conditions on a feature basis.
The disadvantages associated with present methods of monitoring alarm conditions are thus that the alarms are not always user provisionable, and hence the user cannot conveniently change the provisioning of alarms, if necessary. This is especially inconvenient in cases in which certain alarm conditions need to be turned off and back on, or otherwise modified frequently. Moreover, for systems that require all of the alarms of the system to follow a single particular alarm profile, there is usually no flexibility provided in how the alarm conditions are handled.
A further disadvantage associated with present network monitoring functions is that very little accommodation is made to monitor measurable performance or characteristic metrics. For example, present systems typically do not include a provision that allows a user to measure various network characteristics such as performance characteristics, scheduling characteristics, and other such measurable parameters. Furthermore, such systems do not allow system administrators to conveniently define user profiles that define a wide variety of user characteristics and that can be conveniently used to organize and administer new or existing users.
What is needed therefore, is a network monitoring system that allows flexible monitoring of alarm conditions on a feature basis, and that defines and monitors certain measurable network characteristics, such as performance metrics and user profiles.